Jerry Falwell

Jerry Lamon Falwell, Sr. (11 August 1933-15 May 2007) was an American Southern Baptist pastor, televangelist, and conservative activist. Falwell was known for leading the "Moral Majority", a prominent political organization that would assist Ronald Reagan and the Republican Party in winning several elections during the 1980s.

Biography
Jerry Lamon Falwell Sr. was born in Lynchburg, Virginia on 11 August 1933, and he graduated from the Baptist Bible College in 1956. He founded the Thomas Road Baptist Church that same year, and it went from having just 35 members to becoming a megachurch; he also had his own television and radio programs. During the 1950s and 1960s, he campaigned against Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Civil Rights movement, opposing the desegregation of public schools by the US government. Falwell hosted segregationist politicians such as Lester Maddox and George Wallace on his evangelist program The Old-Time Gospel Hour, and he claimed that segregation was a line of distinction drawn by God. In 1967, he founded the Liberty Christian Academy as a private school for white students, and he founded Liberty University in 1971.

Moral Majority
By 1974, the IRS revoked the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University for forbidding interracial dating and for preventing blacks from attending the school until 1971, and the infuriated Falwell argued that it was easier to open a massage parlor than it was to open a Christian school. In 1978, the IRS revoked the tax-exempt status of all-white private schools because of their failure to comply with Brown v. Board of Education, leading to Falwell and other white evangelicals allying with other political conservatives. In 1978, Falwell founded the Moral Majority, allying with Catholic protest groups that opposed abortion. The Moral Majority became a very prominent lobbying group during the 1980s, describing itself as pro-life, pro-traditional family, pro-moral, and pro-American. During the United States presidential election, 1980, Falwell purchased $10,000,000 in commercials on southern radio to claim that President Jimmy Carter had betrayed the South and was no longer a Christian, and Billy Graham criticized Falwell for sermonizing issues with no moral value.

Falwell became known as a strong supporter of Israel (despite claiming that Jews were "spiritually blind" and in need of the Messiah, Jesus, as well as claiming that the Antichrist would be Jewish), a vehement opponent of gay rights and secularism, and a critic of Islam (which he called "satanic"). After 9/11, he claimed that America deserved the attacks, and he said that pagans, abortionists, feminists, gays and lesbians, the ACLU, People For the American Way, and secularists helped the attacks to happen. In 2006, he claimed that the wars in the Middle East were leading to the apocalypse. On 15 May 2007, he died of an irregular heartbeat at his office in Lynchburg at the age of 73.